The Burnout series
has already received critical acclaim for their carnage-packed
gameplay on the consoles and Criterion Games has tried to distil the
Burnout recipe into the tight footprint of the iPad. As part of
this squeeze, Burnout Crash! takes an overhead view of the action
and is separated into different levels, each comprising of a
junction or intersection with different cars entering and exiting
and you trying to destroy everything in sight.

Each level starts
with your car powering towards the intersection and then
strategically stopping in the most inconvenient position, blocking
as much traffic as possible and causing as much destruction as
possible. After your first car crash, it can then be inexplicably
dragged around the intersection, causing even more chaos. At the
bottom of the screen is the Crashbreaker bar that fills up every few
seconds, at which point it causes your car to explode. Anything in
close vicinity to your car when the Crashbreaker sets off is pushed
aside and possibly set alight - the Crashbreaker can even destroy
any nearby buildings. Anything onscreen is a possible target -
escaping cars, buildings, airplanes, boats, caravans - even air
traffic control towers.

The action is
frenetic as you need to cause a certain amount of damage in a short
amount of time. You get points for all the destruction you cause
and extra points for specific goals (eg destroying a gold car,
allowing an ambulance to go through etc). Some levels require you
to fill up a crash meter before triggering “features”, destructive
forces like UFOs, tidal waves and the like that carve a path of
destruction through the intersection, destroying all and sundry.
Also, another object to keep an eye out for is the pizza van, that
when destroyed, allows you to spin the Pizza Wheel of Fortune, that
rewards you with in-play bonuses (speeding up/slowing down/heat
seeking missiles/armoured vans).

Each level has a
number of goals in place and each of the goals earn you a star to be
used to gain additional cars and levels. There are only a limited
number of levels (only 18) in the game, making the game pretty
short, but loads of fun while it lasts. Music is hilarious with
smatterings of classic tunes and crazy radio-announcer-like
catchcries. With the features and the points and the weird music,
this is seriously the closest thing I have played to a poker machine
on the iPad without actually playing a poker machine. The range of
different things happening (ambulances, armoured vehicles, pizza
vans, cars escaping) all set to the zany music and sound is just
crazy fun. It feels a lot like eating junk food - not a lot of
substance, it attacks your senses in different ways, not
particularly good for you but great while it lasts - but afterwards,
the satisfaction does not stay around for very long. All in all, a
nice fun diversion of a game.